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Victorian poetry
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The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burden to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
(Tithonus, 1833; published 1860)
These lines also illustrate Tennyson’s musicality, his belief that language
should recreate the sights, sounds, and rhythms of vision of life, as
witnessed here by the falling movement of each melancholic line. However,
such poems also show a stronger, fighting spirit, in the face of challenges:
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
(Ulysses, 1833; published 1842)
After the death of the nation’s hero, the Duke of Wellington
(commemorated by Tennyson as ‘the last great Englishman’ in an
Ode, 1852), the Crimean War introduced a note of futility, and The
Charge of the Light Brigade commemorates one of the most futile
moments of heroism in that war:
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred . . .
Someone had blundered:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die . . .
This note of courage against all odds is the beginning of the characteristic
‘stiff-upper-lip’ behaviour which came to be seen as typifying British
emotions. The contrast between early Victorian sentiment and this denial
of emotion is remarkable. On the one hand, it can be seen as a denial of
human feelings, of a blindness to reality; on the other hand, of courage in
difficult situations, even of heroism. Commentators have frequently accused
Tennyson of sentimentality and self-pity. He has also been criticised for
being more concerned with sensations than with ideas, and with simply
conveying experience, rather than reflecting on it. But such accusations
may be overstated. The sentimentality of, for example, Little Nell’s death in
Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, represents the final scene in a tearful